As promised, some follow-up from Friday’s peek at the three 5-man dungeons in Icecrown Citadel:

MMO Champion has a couple of screen-shot Galleries up, a more general one is attached to this post. One focused on the Pit of Saron is here. Matticus has some additional, more personal, shots on his post.

The folks at WoW.com (that’s formerly WoW Insider, you know) went into the Pit of Saron over the weekend. Their impression of tanking is here. Oh, and there’s some healer info as well, but who the heck cares about that? (The TL&DR is that at the moment the instance is fairly standard 5-man fare if you are already in Tier 9 level raid epics, but probably significantly more challenging if you’re just making the move up from, say, Trial of the Champion.)

Some other interesting tidbits have also come out regarding the upcoming Patch:

There are weekly quests for raids given out by The Council of Six. These give a whopping ten Emblems of Frost (that would be the token drop from Icecrown I imagine). Currently, there are twelve of these, 3 in Naxxaramas, 4 in Ulduar, 2 in Trial of the Crusader, 1 in Icecrown Citadel, as well as Malygos and Sartharion. Talk about something else to do with your raid if you finish early.

There is quite a good deal of speculation about Quel’Delar, the sword that is embedded in the ice just south of the Argent Tournament. It seems unlikely that this will be a second Legendary in Icecrown (see Shadowmourne), and MMO Champion seems to think that it will be a quest to give it to the Argent Crusade. Myself, I think it is more likely somehow related to Shadowmourne, perhaps the axe is salvaged from the remains of the blade? No doubt we will find out soon enough.

The Frozen Halls is going to be the new 5-man instance associated with Icecrown Citadel. It looks, quite frankly, awesome, and I am sure that it will present some unique challenges, especially for those of you who didn’t do much in the way of instancing in Classic/Vanilla WoW.

Things I would expect:

Separate instance branches, ala Scarlet Monastery, but gated to make sure you go through them in order at least once.

Heavy lore content on Jaina Proudmore and Sylvanus Windrunner, your NPC guides through this excursion. Wowwiki links provided for studying purposes. Both have very strong relationships with Arthas, though very different obviously.

Related to the above point, I expect some kind of resolution or, at least, partial redemption for Arthas. It’s important to remember that he is only half of the Lich King (the other half being Ner’zhul).

Extremely well itemized loot. The reported item levels place it on par with the stuff from Trial of the Crusader – meaning it will likely be a regular trip for those of us looking to fill out our gear-sets, or even get slight upgrades thanks to better distribution of stats (and I bet you were wondering why it looked like ToC had a surplus of Block Value and Block Rating).

And some sketchy predictions:

Some revisiting of strategies for old raid fights, scaled down for 5-man. Call me nutty, but the “Devourer of Souls” sounds not unlike the “Reliquary of Souls.” Falric and Marwyn seems like a fight likely akin to either the Twin Valkyrs or the Eredar Twins.

A new “Emblem” token that drops in the 5-man as well as in the raid content. This might also come as a reward for the Heroic daily, but they won’t change the tokens that drop in the instance itself.

And for my last prediction: You will actually be able to defeat the Lich King in the 5-man dungeon. There is no particular reason why the right to kill the big bad guy should be reserved for Raiders, and I am pretty certain Blizzard intends for everyone to get their shot in at him.

It’s been a while since we’ve had an instance of this size to stick our teeth into, and almost never with the amount of key lore points. Frozen Halls is likely to be a treat, and I will be sure to let you know any more nibblets of information I get about it or any other Patch 3.3 goodness that comes along.

As a side note, if you see some changes going on to the blog over the weekend, don’t be alarmed. I’m doing some renovations.